Modern healthcare requires the concurrent provision of services by many health-care workers to many patients. In order to accomplish this, healthcare delivery has been organized into specialized departments such as nursing, laboratory, and radiology departments. Each department has responsibility for accomplishing its particular, often specialized, subset of tasks. Unfortunately, this has resulted in fragmented patient care and sub-optimal healthcare operations. A single healthcare process such as the ordering and administration of a medication, requires the participation of many health-care workers, possibly across many departments, and is therefore fraught with opportunities for error and delay.
Clinical and healthcare information systems provide a computerized interface for health-care workers to perform individual tasks. However, these systems typically have limited capability to manage the sequence of tasks involved in healthcare processes. This is particularly true when the processes require the involvement of multiple health-care workers. Workflow management systems are designed to manage complex processes that include individual work steps performed by multiple workers and systems. They allow the customized configuration of these processes, as well as continuous monitoring and management while the processes are in progress. In order to optimally employ a workflow management system in healthcare, it is desirable that the system support configuration of a workflow (i.e. determination of a sequence and schedule of tasks to be performed by one or more individuals) at a local level. Such a local level may be within a facility where the workflow is to be implemented, for example.
Existing healthcare or clinical information systems provide user interfaces for performing individual healthcare tasks and viewing and recording of information. This includes, for example, results reporting, goods and services ordering, clinical and nursing care documentation, and financial or operational data capture. However, existing systems are typically task oriented, and provide interfaces for individuals to accomplish specific tasks. As such they fail to provide the flexible and comprehensive user interfaces and systems needed to support the adequate management of clinical care and documentation processes that involve multiple users, and which occur over an extended period of time, and are amenable to reengineering. A system according to invention principles addresses these deficiencies and derivative deficiencies. Specifically the disclosed system supports creation, initiation and modification of workflow processes that sequence tasks to be performed by healthcare personnel and also supports the monitoring and management of the tasks and of their progress until their successful completion.